Lisa Find Love

When my father was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, our family was desperate to track down why. The Ludlows didn’t get cancer. We had zero family history. And besides, we’d all expected an affliction of the lung to do him in. He smoked two packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes a day for 40-plus years.

His oncologist said Dad perfectly matched the profile of the typical stomach cancer patient: 71 years old, male, A positive blood type. The Mayo Clinic website fingered his diet, which was high in salty, smoked, and pickled foods and relatively low in fresh produce. But something else gnawed at me.

It was our lawn. As a longtime health journalist, I questioned the 50 years of pesticides Dad had sprayed on our suburban grass. I can picture it still, the rolling fertilizer dispenser tossing white pellets to and fro, pellets my dad marched through, then tracked all over our house. In the ’70s, Dad would become an early ChemLawn enthusiast. He was the first on our block to install timed sprinklers. A carpet-like lawn gave my father great satisfaction.

To make matters worse, he spent his Sundays clomping around a perfectly manicured golf course, often licking the grass stains off his Titleists.

The evidence on pesticide dangers has mounted, and many cities and towns have restricted its use for cosmetic purposes. But suburban America still wants lawns that look like putting greens. I shuddered to read McKay Jenkins’s moving story about the price we pay.

Steve and I keep our New Jersey lawn neatly trimmed but let it grow “wild.” I walk Milo far from any little white lawn flags signifying a recent spray, and I’ve taught my daughters to leave their outside shoes at the front door.

A combination of factors—especially his smoking—caused Dad’s cancer. But personally, I’ll always hold the poisons on grass partially responsible.

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As an advice columnist, I frequently receive letters from people who say they are writing to
me because they’ve quit their therapy. They give many reasons: They don’t like the therapist. They feel their therapist doesn’t like them. They feel misunderstood or blamed. They are unhappy with progress. They don’t think the therapist can handle their issues. They’ve reached the conclusion that the therapist thinks they are hopeless. They think that because they aren’t getting along with this therapist, all therapy is useless.

What worries me most about these letters is not that they’ve quit (there are lots of good reasons for ending treatment) but that they never talked to their therapists about their concerns. They just stopped going. By handling their dissatisfaction in this way, it’s very possible they deprived themselves of a great opportunity to move their therapy forward.

You and your therapist are limited in your work together by what you choose to share. It’s like starting to make a pizza for dinner during a blizzard. Unless you are willing to brave the storm to go to the store, you can only make the pizza with what’s in the fridge. If there aren’t enough ingredients or it comes out half-baked, you’ll wonder why you bothered. Even if it’s kind of interesting, if it isn’t what you had it mind, you’ll be disappointed. You may decide to eat it anyway despite being dissatisfied or you may just throw the whole thing out. You may conclude you’re a lousy cook or that pizza is a terrible food — when the problem was in what went into making it in the first place.

The same is true of therapy. To move toward your personal goals, you have to pull out whatever is in your emotional and mental “fridge.” That means sharing your feelings, your doubts, your fears, your satisfactions and dissatisfactions — whatever is going on in your mind and heart. You may have to even go out into what feels like a risky mental blizzard, having faith that you and the therapist can keep you safe in the storm. If you don’t share your thoughts and feelings, you and your therapist are left trying to help you make sense of your life without all the necessary ingredients. It simply doesn’t work. The “pizza” (the therapeutic progress) you make together will be disappointing. Sadly, you may decide you are both terrible cooks and give up trying.

Yes, I know, it’s difficult to talk about things you’d rather not talk about. It’s frightening to bring up issues that you have buried for years. You may be ashamed of something you did or didn’t do. You may worry that your therapist will judge you harshly. You may be so anxious, upset, depressed or uptight that even thinking about talking about whatever you’re avoiding talking about is exhausting. But they are all necessary ingredients in the process.

Your observations and opinions about the therapist are also in your mental “fridge.” They too need to be put on the worktable. You may be right in your judgment that the therapist is tired or preoccupied or just doesn’t “get” you. It’s certainly possible that the therapist doesn’t have the wisdom to help you with your particular problem or has personal biases that get in the way. But it’s also possible that you have misinterpreted her comments or behaviors due to your own filters or assumptions or fears. It’s possible that you’ve signaled your therapist that you are too fragile to get down to work as yet, so she is holding back, too.

There are two predictable results to holding back any negative issues about your therapist and therapy: You may end up just hanging out with your therapist once a week to get emotionally stroked instead of working on the hard stuff. That inclination is perfectly normal. Difficult issues are difficult for a reason. They are so difficult that they are probably the reason you came into therapy in the first place. But hiding challenging issues behind the ketchup in your emotional fridge will only preserve them (or give them a chance to grow even hairier and scarier).

Or, you might decide to quit because you feel you can get the same thing for free from your hairstylist or bartender. That’s also understandable. When people don’t get what they need from a relationship, they often break up and look elsewhere. But breaking up from your therapist may be another way to avoid understanding why you are blocked or your part in what is keeping it that way. Closing the fridge door doesn’t change what’s in there.

Fortunately, there is another option for getting unstuck in therapy besides “hang out” or quit. You can decide to push through the block. Doing so can change the relationship between the cooks (you and your therapist) and alter the recipe (the ingredients and the process) for making changes in your life.

If you think the problem is that you aren’t clicking with your therapist, the block may be a metaphor for what happens in other relationships in your life. Perhaps you’ve never figured out how to have a difficult conversation with someone you perceive to be an authority. Maybe the therapist reminds you of someone else in your life who disappoints you. Perhaps you have learned to keep some things to yourself because you’ve had disastrous experiences in the past when you’ve tried to be honest about your feelings or opinions. The only way you’ll find out what’s getting in your way in your relationship to your therapist is to start talking about it. The conversation may lead to new insights about how you function in other relationships as well as to understanding new and more helpful ways to interact with others.

If you make your best effort to change the relationship so it works for you and you still get nowhere, maybe you are correct that you need to hire another cook (therapist). But please don’t do that without discussing it. Navigating how you leave is another opportunity for growth.

If, however, you are comfortable with the therapist but you’re scared to talk about the hard stuff (that icky stuff in the back of our metaphorical “fridge”), you need to dig down to find the courage to bring it into the open. It’s those hard parts of your life, the parts that you find upsetting and perhaps shameful or angry-making, that will lead you and your therapist to the place where you have the most opportunity to grow. Once the therapist has been given a glimpse into what’s in the back of your “fridge,” she has a better idea about how to help you. Once you see that the therapist handles what’s back there with compassion and wisdom and offers some guidance about what to do next, you will feel more willing to stay for the next, and probably much more helpful, round.

As much as I sometimes wish that I could relieve my clients of their distress on my own, I know full well that it takes both of us to cook up a satisfying outcome. If you are even thinking about quitting, devote at least one session to talking it over. When you pull out all your “stuff,” you may give both you and your therapist enough ingredients to work with to relieve your pain and to develop new and more satisfying life choices. In the process of confronting whatever you think is getting in the way of a successful working relationship, you may also discover how to improve other relationships and avoid repeating past mistakes. It’s worth one hour more to give it that chance. If you still don’t see improvement, you can leave knowing that you did your best.

If you do decide to leave the therapist but are still in pain, I hope you won’t quit therapy just because that particular relationship didn’t work for you. That would be like never eating pizza again because you didn’t get what you wanted that time you tried to make one. Like all people, therapists have different personalities and skills. You may just need to find the one that cooks well with you.

Therapy image provided by Shutterstock.

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Since the publication of my book Overcoming OCD: A Journey to Recovery, I’ve had several interviews as well as appearances where I’ve talked about our family’s story.

Invariably, I get comments from people applauding my support for my son throughout his battle with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. I have to admit I’m always taken a little aback by these comments and they make me feel a little uncomfortable. Why should I be commended for doing what most good parents feel is their responsibility — to love, care for, and advocate for the well-being of our children? Indeed, I receive emails regularly from parents who are doing that very thing right now: searching for the right path to best help their children.

Of course I am aware that I typically only receive emails from parents who are supportive, and I am not going to be contacted by those who believe their children should just “get over it,” or should “stop being dramatic.” There are also those families who do not want “everyone knowing their business,” and believe mental health issues should be kept private.

I know these negative situations exist because I have heard from many people with obsessive-compulsive disorder who were treated this way by their own parents. From being ignored to being yelled at to being called crazy, these stories are heartbreaking to me. I know how difficult it was for my son to fight his OCD, and he did indeed have a supportive family. I can’t even being to imagine what it is like for children and teenagers who have no family backing to rely on.

Another comment I hear a lot is how great it is that I, as a layperson, understand so much about obsessive-compulsive disorder. Certainly I have learned a lot about OCD over the past eight years, and I do have a fair amount of “book knowledge” about the disorder. But understand it? Not in a million years. How can anybody understand a disorder that is irrational and makes no sense? Do I understand why my son couldn’t even eat? Why he couldn’t move from his perceived “safe chair” for hours and hours? Why he couldn’t go into most buildings on his college campus or be around his friends? No, I don’t understand these things. My only explanation is that he had severe OCD.

I am bringing this up because I want to stress that, in my opinion, truly understanding OCD is not what’s important. What’s important is that we understand our children: that they are truly suffering, that they are doing the best they can at any given time, and that the most helpful thing we can do for them is love and support them in appropriate ways. In other words, we need to understand that OCD is real — as real as any other illness out there. And so our children or other loved ones who are dealing with it should not be ignored, demeaned, or ridiculed, but rather cared for, supported, and loved. That, in a nutshell, is all we need to know about OCD.

OCD Blocks image via Shutterstock.

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Mindfulness. It’s become a buzzword, permeating everything from Youtube to corporate retreats. Even if you have little sense of what it means to be mindful, you’ve likely encountered the word in your personal and professional life. So if the title of Achim Nowak’s book, The Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating a Mindful Life in a Distracted World, conjures images of mountaintop meditation classes, don’t worry. Nowak strives throughout the text to make the concepts he discusses accessible to all readers. By no means a comprehensive text, The Moment seeks to introduce the reader to “mindful living” using short anecdotes and exercises.

Despite its aim of popular appeal and appropriately frank tone, The Moment may not engage everyone who peruses its pages. Nowak’s experiences as a theater director, acting teacher, and writer traveling the globe to exotic locations are far from universal. The Moment is in many respects a personal text, as driven by Nowak’s personality and public persona as it is by any of the concepts contained therein.

Consequently, established fans of his work will likely find much to enjoy here, whereas newcomers may be titillated or off-put by his autobiographical digressions. To its credit, The Moment admirably embodies its subject: it is a series of moments through which Nowak illustrates his key principles of engaging the senses, creating meaning, cultivating energy, and slowing time. In short, The Moment is a quick, easy read that presents an entertaining introduction to the notion of mindfulness through the lens of Nowak’s unusual life experiences.

No doubt so readers can easily review and return to various concepts, Nowak has divided The Moment into six sections. “The Moment Begins” and the “The Moment Continues” bookend the discussion of what he calls his four keys: “Awaken the Senses,” “Crave Meaning,” “Wave-Ride Energy,” and, “Make Time Stand Still.” The text also includes a forward by author and entrepreneur, Faisal Hoque, who writes glowingly about the book, as well as a brief series of notes for further reading and a fairly thorough index for easy maneuvering. The Moment is nothing if not approachable. It divides further into a series of titled vignettes, each relating different situations to inform our understanding of the text’s key ideas.

The first of these, “Helen at the Airport” relates the story of one of Nowak’s friends, who meets an intriguing man at an airport bookstore. Instead of lingering, she rushes to her plane, only to change her mind at the last minute. When she returns to the bookstore, however, the man is gone, and she regrets having missed her opportunity. This use of narrative dominates The Moment, with Nowak relating his own “moments” or those of his many remarkable acquaintances throughout the text.

These anecdotes take place all over the world from India and the Caribbean to New York City and Washington, DC, lending a particular cosmopolitan sensibility to the reflections and remembered conversations. This is not to say that The Moment takes itself too seriously. Indeed, to his credit, Nowak returns again and again to the statement that his exercises should be enjoyable experiences: “And never forget that these are meant to be joyful explorations, not chores!”

The exercises themselves range from the very simple and easily accomplished—sense isolation accomplished by closing your eyes, focusing on particular objects, eating a meal alone—to the more involved and less universally accessible—having someone unlock your chi. There is nothing particularly revolutionary on the menu in these suggestions.

Nevertheless, a reader new to the notion of mindfulness may be glad for a preliminary roadmap for their explorations. Maybe you would have taken a yoga class without prompting from The Moment, but perhaps you would not have felt comfortable “unobligating yourself” for an afternoon. Notably, Nowak makes ready use of Hindu concepts such as prajna (unconscious wisdom) and Shakti (energy) but in such a way that familiarizes the reader with potentially unfamiliar vocabulary.

At its heart, The Moment seeks to provide readers with opportunities to think about how we engage the world. In a sense, we’re taking a brief moment out of our lives to read this book without worrying about work or family or other commitments. However, as I’ve noted, this is by no means a comprehensive text. It’s a gently written taste of mindful living, delivered from Nowak’s particular perspective. Its success or failure largely depends on what each reader requires of it. If you’re looking for an extensive discussion of mindful living that examines multiple approaches or philosophies, The Moment will be an insufficient offering. If your need is for something you can dip into from time to time for inspiration or guidance, this very well could be the book for you.

The Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating a Mindful Life in a Distracted World
New Page Books, December 21, 2015
Paperback, 92 pages
$14.99

If you have ever seen the movies The Three Faces of Eve or Sybil, you might have found yourself second guessing your own behavior or wondering whether close friends or family have multiple personalities, but the popularity and sensationalism of these movies do not necessarily reflect the many nuanced and serious components of dissociative disorders. That’s why so many mental health professionals have spent the years following the production of these two films attempting to explain dissociative disorders.  The latest attempt, Richard Chefetz’s Intensive Psychotherapy for Persistent Dissociative Processes: The Fear of Feeling Real, does a fantastic job of explaining the dissociative process of patients who have struggled with connecting their painful history to their current reality.

Early on, Chefetz makes it clear to the reader that his book is not about multiple personality disorder (or dissociative identity disorder), but rather the experience of separation from the self, external world, or emotions.  The author clarifies that most people engage in a form of dissociation that is not easily identifiable by others, even clinicians.

For some individuals who have endured traumatic experiences, the brain’s way of coping will result in lost memories or positive restructuring of life events. For other individuals, dissociation (i.e., the separation of the self from one’s own thoughts, feelings, and emotions) occurs and the individual is unable to connect the negative experience to their reality. When working with young clients who are showing symptoms and behaviors of dissociative processes, I often have to explain to parents that dissociation is basically like a severe out-of-body experience or daydream. Once the body and mind begin to dissociate, it is difficult to get that individual to identify when they need help.

Chafetz explains dissociation in multiple ways using a psychoanalytical and psychodynamic approach. He reviews the cases of two of his patients, and these case studies, although difficult to conceptualize for the first-time reader on the topic of dissociation, show how dissociation is not exhibited in ways you might imagine or assume. Chefetz explains the difficulty involved in identifying covert dissociative processes during a session and highlights the importance of treatment providers’ being aware of dissociative symptoms. Dissociative processes, according to Chefetz, are also sometimes overt and can be easily identified in patients as they contradict themselves during conversation, express contradictory emotions or desires, and/or send emails that include multiple inconsistencies in thought patterns. Chefetz demonstrates the fear that many of his client’s had in attempting to face reality, process their feelings, or cope with their dissociation.

Unfortunately, if you are not familiar with psychotherapy and struggle with a scientific explanation of behavior, this book is not for you. Although Chefetz does a great job of discussing the complexities of dissociative processes and “the fear of being real,” Chefetz risks losing his reader by incorporating technical terms that are not only complicated, but relative to psychobabble. Unfortunately, the technical terms can undermine the psychological knowledge the book strives to provide its reader. As a therapist, I would not recommend this book for laymen attempting to understand dissociative disorders, processes, or experience. This book is certainly better suited for a student in training, a mental health professional, or a layman with prior knowledge of the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy.

That said, Intensive Psychotherapy for Persistent Dissociative Processes is a great book for professionals working with client’s who dissociate. Overall, Chefetz offers readers a great deal to think about and consider when living or working with someone who suffers from dissociative disorders and dissociative experiences. Most important, Chefetz offers an  inside look at dissociative processes and stimulates the reader’s mind on how to intervene, heal, and care for someone struggling with dissociation.

Intensive Psychotherapy for Persistent Dissociative Processes: The Fear of Feeling Real
W. W. Norton & Company, April 6, 2015
Hardcover, 496 pages
$42.50

She’s strong, powerful, successful, and driven. Sounds like I’m describing an amazing woman, right? Trouble is, when it comes to dating, the same traits that make you amazing in your career can fall flat in your love life.

At some point in your life, you’ll encounter those who say you are intimidating, too independent, and don’t have enough feminine energy to attract a lasting relationship. They’ll tell you to change. They’ll tell you to fit into a box of what men find attractive and you’ll in turn settle for someone who doesn’t quite cut it.

You don’t have to settle and you don’t have to change. Instead, you get to unleash the feminine power that already makes you a great leader and allows you to attract effortlessly.

How does one do that? The successful woman who breaks through the struggle and finds Love Without Settling thinks, feels, and does things differently.

HERE ARE 5 THINGS A SUCCESSFUL WOMAN DOES TO GET LOVE WITHOUT SETTLING:

You love your life and live in your vision with or without a partner.

You know that it’s not enough to say that you want something in the future; you have to live in it now. You don’t wait for a partner to live an amazing life. You want to travel, and you do it. When you want to learn a new language, you get it done. Want to sit at the beach every Sunday with your favorite book? Nothing is stopping you.

You fill your life with friends, family, and activities you love, because not having a partner doesn’t stop you from living. You know that when you live a life you love you attract the partner that will live that life with you.

You don’t compromise who you are while compromising with your partner.

You know who you are. You know your value and what you value. You set healthy boundaries. You communicate your needs. You stand up for yourself. You don’t compromise yourself.

When in a relationship, you know that compromise is done for the greater good of the relationship. You don’t compare sacrifices because it is your choice to compromise. You pick your compromises and don’t go against your value and values.

You are compassionate with others, but most importantly with yourself.

Your compassion for others makes you trustworthy. You care about others and understand that no one is perfect. A man can open up to you because he feels that you will accept him and won’t judge him.

In that same vain you are able to trust yourself. You are able to accept your imperfections. You are able to forgive yourself and not judge your past mistakes. You speak to yourself with kindness and love.

You let go of your past and walk through fear.

You don’t allow fears to block you. The unknown doesn’t keep you from moving forward. The thought of being hurt doesn’t keep you from loving. You let go of your past through forgiveness, even if that means forgiving someone who never asked to be forgiven.

You walk through fear, because we fear the good as much as we fear the bad. Look at all that you’ve already overcome and you have always gotten through to the other side.

You know there’s power in your femininity.

You know that your femininity creates collaboration in both your work place and your relationship. It allows for empathy. It allows you to receive love and nurtures your loved ones to grow. You know that without femininity there is no growth.

You know that your vulnerability brings you closer to your partner, and that when you allow yourself the freedom to be seen, your body, heart, and mind align.

The successful woman who finds love knows that these are all choices just as loving and being loved is a choice.

_____

Want to learn what the successful woman does in more detail?

Join love coach Ravid Yosef and some of the world’s best experts in the areas of love, relationships, business, wellness, & confidence help you discover how to embrace your success and get the relationship and life you desire so that you can finally ‘have it all’!

Click here to JOIN this FREE Online Event, Love Without Settling!

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If you have ever been curious about why we relentlessly seek happiness, or if you find that you want to cultivate a more positive mindset, then this book should be added to your reading list. Habits of a Happy Brain is a junction between self-help and neuroscience; it’s filled with simple language that packs an informative punch. I have only good things to say about this book, and believe that everyone should dip into this 238-page story about our anatomical motherboard: the human brain.

“You can learn to turn on your happy chemicals in new ways… then you can wire it into your brain by repeating it for forty-five days without fail,” writes Breuning.  But before you can learn how to harness happy chemicals, you have to understand them, and Bruening provides an abundance of examples on chemical triggers, how they differ in animals and reptiles, how we differ from our ancestors, and how these chemicals impact decisions and experiences in modern society.  

She explores how our ancestors were concerned with day to day survival (dopamine surges), but how we are more concerned with oxytocin surges (or lack thereof) in a world now designed as a socially driven machine. We want to be part of the pack, but hate falling in line.  We want to belong, but maintain our independence. This is one of many examples Bruening uses to illustrate how chemicals lead us, and like much of the book can help you re-shape how much you worry about your actions and choices.

Even more interesting, Breuning takes time periodically throughout the book to remind us of something we all know well (but often forget): Everyone is different.  “We are not born with circuits defining the rewards that meet our needs. We build them from life experience. That’s why one person gets excited about eating crickets while another person gets excited about the Food Network.” While her book focuses on happy chemicals it’s easy to see how this works the same for sadness, too.  After all, they are two sides of the same coin, and when reading the above excerpt, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a friend while in high school.

This friend was obsessed with good grades. She had to get A’s. She had to make honor roll. She had to have a perfect GPA.  During our senior year she got a low grade on a test and she cried for hours in her car while I consoled her.

“I feel guilty!” she bawled. “There are children starving around the world and I am crying because I couldn’t maintain my GPA.”

“You have a different threshold for what upsets you. You’ve never known what it’s like to starve. You don’t live a life where you are constantly worried about your next meal, so it’s hard for you to switch out of your current mindset because your grades and getting into a good college are your worries.  Take a deep breath and give yourself a break.  You need to allow yourself to mourn your GPA for a second and then you can pull yourself together and start worrying about global issues again.”

I didn’t know it then, but I was on point with this advice. My friend found happiness by achieving good grades just like someone who has known hunger finds happiness when eating food.  While comparison can humble us in positive ways, it’s important to remember that your brain is wired for your direct experience.  If you expect yourself to be upset and thrilled about all the same things as everyone else, you are going to soon realize that you weren’t built to be the same as everyone else.  Later on in the book, Breuning makes it a point to comment on this type of happiness-guilt comparison mentality, saying, “It’s reasonable to feel bad about the suffering of others and to help where you can. But your brain is designed to focus on your well-being.”

Rounding out the book are some small exercises and one important question each reader must ask themselves in order to design an action plan for a happy-wired brain: What type of chemical drives you? Are you most comfortable seeking respect? Getting rewards? Building social alliances? Or seeking pain just to ignore it? I didn’t anticipate this sort of analysis, but when you stop to reflect on it, Breuning’s question makes perfect sense.  Don’t we all know someone who thrives off of being popular (serotonin junkie)?  Or someone caught in a bad relationship with someone who hurts them over and over again (endorphin junkie)? Or what about the person who is friends with everyone (oxytocin junkie)? Just like a drug addict must admit his or her drug of choice, so must we analyze which happy chemicals drive us.

So what do we do once we identify our happy chemical?  We begin wiring our brain for happiness by focusing on the other chemicals that trigger happiness. This is where the forty-five day plan comes into play.  Breuning suggests the best way to build more pathways for happy chemicals in your brain is to spend time focusing on your weaknesses. For instance, since dopamine triggers come easily to me, it would be best for me to start creating serotonin pathways.

At its core, Breuning’s method is a form of self-imposed mind manipulation, but a fascinating one with the potential to change your life!

Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels
Adams Media, December 16, 2015
Paperback, 238 pages
$15.99

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I first came across Colin Wilson while researching a paper on murder back in the late 1970s. Wilson was a criminologist who wrote extensively about crime and murder — about 180 books and 626 articles and other written work as well, including books on philosophy and novels. An End to Murder is his last work, but he died in 2013. His son, Damon, completed the book, which stands as a work on its own and as a memorial to his father.

The book is in three parts, with the first and last by Damon Wilson and the middle section by Colin. I was amazed by the range and breadth of material. Damon Wilson begins in part one by going back to pre-human history. He looks at how we evolved and at different theories of how we came to kill each other, how we came to be bipedal, and even how we became able to hold our breath.

The section written by Colin Wilson took me back to his prior books. He goes over cases he has written about before and adds in some new material. He has written extensively about serial killers, even before we used that term, and notes how the numbers have gone down the past couple of decades. One of the reasons for the decrease, he writes, may be that we don’t give serial killers as much attention as we once did — and he admits that he was one of those who gave the murderers attention.

Here, I thought about how, these days, we tend to focus more on mass killings than on the serial kind. I wondered what Colin Wilson would say about recent events.

Damon Wilson’s sections of the book cover an incredibly broad range of topics on violence in human history. I have rarely come across a work that draws from this many branches of study: anthropology, genetics, psychology, history, and more. He examines slavery and cannibalism. He looks at how the rise of agriculture and cities and industrialization may have affected human behavior. He even delves a bit into the spiritual. And, he looks cross-culturally as well. Reading him, I learned about civil wars in China that killed as many people as world wars — but civil wars I had never learned about in school.

The book has an almost conversational tone, as though a knowledgeable friend were telling us about his theory of human violence, how that violence differs from behavior in other species, and how it has changed over time.

The only error I caught in this vast work was a mention of John Wayne Gacy being in Texas rather than in Chicago. I expect it will be corrected in subsequent editions. And though at times the writing felt a bit like free association, there was always a pattern and reason for the stories and how they unfolded in the text.

Damon Wilson notes that life is actually getting safer these days. You are much less likely to be killed by your fellow man than you were centuries ago, or even just a few decades ago. He cites several possible theories: among them, the removal of lead from gasoline and other products, and a “good apple” theory. He does address terrorism and mass murder, as well as our treatment of the environment and the short- and longterm consequences of that treatment. But he is much more optimistic than our pundits and politicians.

In the end, it is clear that both authors cherish life. Their book will teach you a lot you didn’t know about history and human behavior and violence. You’ll probably question some of the theories, but you’ll definitely come away with a broader perspective.

An End to Murder: A Criminologist’s View of Violence Throughout History
Skyhorse Publishing, November 2015
Hardcover, 592 pages
$26.99

On a beautiful April day, I decided to meet outside with my students at the University of Delaware, where I teach journalism. We sat on the central lawn between two buildings that just happened to bear the names of two gargantuan chemical companies: DuPont and Gore. In the middle of a conversation about agricultural pesticides, a groundskeeper, dressed from feet to neck in a white chemical suit, drove by us on a mower. He wasn’t cutting the grass, though; he was spraying it. And not from one nozzle, but from half a dozen. Up and back he went, describing parallel lines as neat as those in any Iowa farmer’s cornfield. Not a blade escaped the spray. This became a perfect teaching moment.

“Who’s going to ask him what he’s spraying?” I asked my students. One young woman marched over to the groundskeeper. He turned off his engine, they spoke, and she returned.

“He said he’s spraying 2,4-D,” she said. “He said we didn’t need to worry, because he sprayed where we’re sitting at five this morning.”

Which would mean about seven hours earlier. My students chuckled uneasily. He was wearing a full-body chem suit, and they were sitting on the grass in shorts and bare feet?

They’d never heard of 2,4-D, or 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. But they had heard of Agent Orange, the notorious defoliant used in Vietnam, and 2,4-D, one of the most extensively used herbicides in the world, is a constituent of Agent Orange (it did not cause the bulk of the devastating effects associated with Agent Orange). It was developed during World War II, mostly as a weapon to destroy an enemy’s rice crops. Despite its history, 2,4-D has long been seen as safe for consumer use.

In the 1940s, botanist E. J. Kraus of the University of Chicago fed five and a half grams of pure 2,4-D to a cow every day for three months. The cow was fine, according to Kraus, as was her calf. Kraus said he himself had eaten half a gram of the stuff every day for three weeks and felt great. This was apparently good enough for the rest of the country; within five years, American companies were annually producing 14 million pounds of the stuff. By 1964, the number had jumped to 53 million pounds.

Today, annual sales of 2,4-D have surpassed $300 million worldwide, and it’s found in “weed and feed” products, like Scotts Green Sweep, Ortho Weed B Gon, Salvo, Weedone, and Spectracide. At first, its impact on humans seems mild—skin and eye irritation, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, stiffness in the arms and legs—and many lawn-care companies have dismissed health concerns. Plus, the businesses add that the amount of chemicals in sprays is very diluted.

But the effects are more worrisome when considered over time. Because 2,4-D is designed to mimic a plant’s natural growth hormone, it causes such rapid cell growth that the stems of treated plants tend to become grotesquely twisted and their roots swollen; the leaves turn yellow and die; and the plants starve to death (2,4-D does not have this effect on grass).

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Unsurprisingly, 2,4-D also appears to affect human hormones. The National Institute of Health Sciences lists it as a suspected endocrine disrupter, and several studies point to its possible contribution to reproductive-health problems and genetic mutations. Although the EPA says there isn’t enough evidence to classify 2,4-D as a carcinogen, a growing body of research has begun to link it to a variety of cancers.

A 1986 National Cancer Institute (NCI) study found that farmers exposed to 2,4-D for 20 or more days a year had a sixfold higher risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Another NCI study showed that dogs were twice as likely to contract lymphoma if their owners used 2,4-D on their lawns.

Like flame retardants, this compound also tends to accumulate inside people’s homes even days after the lawn has been sprayed. One study found 2,4-D in the indoor dust of 63 percent of sampled homes; another showed that levels of the chemical in indoor air and on indoor surfaces increased after lawn applications. After 2,4-D was sprayed, exposure levels for children were ten times higher than before the lawns were treated—an indication of how easily the chemical is tracked inside on the little feet of dogs, cats, and kids.

Thanks to pressure from campus activists, my university replaced 2,4-D with “softer” herbicides and began putting signs on lawns that had just been sprayed. Of course, 2,4-D is one of scores of pesticides in use. According to David Pimentel, professor emeritus of entomology at Cornell University, 110,000 people suffer adverse health effects from pesticides every year, and 10,000 cases of cancer in humans may be attributable to pesticide exposure.

The Greening of America

In 1900, 60 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Today, 83 percent live in cities or suburbs. With that change has come an astonishing shift in the landscape. Over the past half century, Americans have become obsessed with grass. When you add up the country’s 80 million home lawns and over 16,000 golf courses, you get close to 50 million acres of cultivated turf in the United States, an expanse roughly the size of Nebraska. This space is growing by 600 square miles a year.

By 1999, more than two thirds of America’s home lawns had been treated with chemical fertilizers or pesticides—14 million by professional lawn-care companies. A year later, the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that Americans were spraying 67 million pounds of synthetic chemicals on their grass every year, and annual sales of lawn-care pesticides had grown to $700 million.

The landscaping trucks rolling through our suburban neighborhoods seem to represent something more than a communal desire for lush grass. Could it be relief from anxiety? (Why else call a company Lawn Doctor?) For one thing, hiring lawn-care specialists is a public declaration that you have the money not to take care of your yard yourself.

Diligent lawn maintenance and chemical use are also associated with approval and social status, Ohio State researchers reported in 2012: “The main factor influencing a homeowner’s decision to use lawn chemicals is whether neighbors or other people in the neighborhood use them. Homeowners crave acceptance from their neighbors and generally want their lawns to fit in with their surrounding community, so they adopt their neighbors’ practices.”

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We also create manicured lawns to play the most chemically dependent of pastimes: golf. By 2004, there were just under 15,000 golf courses in the United States—a patchwork of chemically treated turf the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

Even grass seed comes coated with chemicals. A close look at a bag of Scotts grass seed reveals it has been treated with Apron XL fungicide, whose active ingredient is Metalaxyl-M, or methyl N-(methoxyacetyl)-N-(2,6-xylyl)-D-alaninate. The bag requests that the product be stored away from foodstuffs, kept out of the reach of children, and not be applied near water, storm drains, or drainage ditches. (A Scotts spokesperson says that its products are designed to be safe when used as directed.)

As the use of chemicals has become widespread, lawn companies have found an unexpected source of profits. Herbicides like 2,4-D preserve grass but kill weeds like clover. Clover, however, pulls nitrogen out of the air and fixes it in the soil. Without clover, soil becomes nitrogen poor and fails to support plant life. So chemical companies now replace the depleted nitrogen, which homeowners used to get for free from clover, with synthetic nitrogen, for which they have to pay.

In America’s watersheds, nitrogen runoff is considered among the worst problems for water quality. Since synthetic fertilizers are water soluble, a good amount runs off your lawn after a rain, where it mixes with runoff from other homes and ends up feeding the plants in bodies of water. Doused with chemicals, algae grow and grow, creating “algae blooms” that—as they decay and die—suck most of the oxygen out of rivers, lakes, and bays and lead to massive “dead zones,” in which neither fish nor plants can live.

In 2007, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation published a report card on the bay’s health that showed just how much trouble chemicals can pose. The bay received an F for nitrogen pollution, a D-minus for phosphorous, an F for water quality, an F for dissolved oxygen, and a D for toxics. On a scale of 100 (with 100 being the best), the bay’s health was rated at 28.

In California, scientists are discovering that algae blooms off the coast not only remove oxygen; they also release a toxin, domoic acid. It enters the food chain when fish eat algae, then moves into the sea lions that consume the fish. If a sea lion is pregnant, her fetus can be contaminated, and years later, that mammal may develop epilepsy.

One Man’s Chemical Conversion

Paul Tukey knows about pesticides; the man who invented 2,4-D was a distant cousin. When Tukey was a kid in the late 1960s, his grandfather hired a biplane to spray his 300 acres of fields in Maine a couple of times a year. The fields were mostly planted with cattle feed, not with crops intended for human consumption. For Tukey, spraying day was a thrill.

“My grandfather would go out in the field, dressed in his wool underwear and thick heavy pants, and wave the biplane over his field,” Tukey recalled. “They’d drop this white powder, and he’d get back in the truck looking like Frosty the Snowman. Then we’d drive to the next field, and he’d do it again. My grandfather was getting doused 20 times a day, but he would never let me get out of the truck. I always wondered why I couldn’t go out and get dusted.”

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Tukey’s grandfather died of a brain tumor at 60.

Tukey also followed his family’s agricultural tradition but charted his own course. For years, he operated one of southern Maine’s largest landscaping services and considered his job ideal. He worked outside in shorts and sandals. He never bothered with putting on protective gear.

In 1993, he started getting nosebleeds. His vision became blurry. But with business booming, Tukey was too busy to worry. One of his jobs was tending the grounds of a hospital where he hired university students for the work. One day, their professor, an eminent horticulturist named Rick Churchill, came by to say hello to his students. Tukey went out to greet him.

Churchill’s eyes were focused on the weeds, which Tukey’s crew had doused with herbicides and which were curling up and turning brown.

Churchill said, “I asked him how anyone in good conscience could be applying pesticides on the grounds of a hospital where there were patients being treated for cancers that could be linked to their exposure to pesticides. I asked whether he knew anything about the toxicity ratings of what he was applying and how dangerous many of these compounds were to an individual compromised by illness.”

The words cut deeply. “It was devastating,” Tukey told me. “In Maine, Rick Churchill is an icon.”

Tukey did some reading, and what he found was troubling. Pediatric cancers in Los Angeles had been linked to parental exposure to pesticides during pregnancy. In Denver, kids whose yards were treated with pesticides were found to be four times more likely to have soft-tissue cancers than kids whose yards were not. Elsewhere, links had been found between brain tumors in children and the use of weed killers, pest strips, and flea collars.

Tukey also learned that exposure to lawn chemicals was particularly alarming for people who spread them for a living. One study showed a threefold increase in lung cancer among lawn-care workers who used 2,4-D; another found a higher rate of birth defects among the children of chemical appliers. When he finally went to the doctor for his rashes and deteriorating eyesight, he learned that he had developed multiple chemical sensitivity. And his son—conceived in 1992, during the height of Tukey’s use of synthetic chemicals—was diagnosed with one of the worst cases of ADHD his physician had ever seen. (Several recent scientific reports suggest that toxic chemicals may play a role in ADHD.)

“All the evidence indicates that you don’t want pregnant women around these products, but I was walking into the house every single night with my legs coated with pesticides from the knees down,” he said. “Even when my son was a year or two old, … [he] would greet me at the door at night by grabbing me around the legs. He was getting pesticides on his hands and probably his face too.”

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Tukey’s Breaking Point

In the midst of his research, Tukey was driving one day when he saw a sign: A store was having a big sale on Scotts Turf Builder. Tukey made a beeline. He was going to buy the store’s entire stock. Once inside, he walked to the lawn-care section. Tukey noticed a woman standing by the lawn chemicals. At her feet, a girl was making sand castles from a broken bag of pesticides. Suddenly, something in him burst—the DDT squirting over his grandfather’s fields, the chemicals that he’d sprayed outside the hospital, and now a child in a pile of pesticides.

Tukey told me, “I said, ‘Ma’am, you really shouldn’t let your child play with that. It’s not safe.’ I’m fundamentally shy, but this just came out of me.”

The store wouldn’t sell the stuff if it wasn’t safe, she told Tukey. She took her child and walked away. A manager came up and asked him if there was a problem. Tukey said there was.

“You have broken bags of poison on the floor,” Tukey said to the manager. “All those bags say, ‘Keep out of reach of children’!”

Those labels are there because of government formality, the manager said. The stuff isn’t dangerous. The store wouldn’t carry it if it was.

“That really was the stake in the heart of my chemical career,” Tukey said. “By then, I’d already made myself sick. I’d already been questioned by Rick Churchill. When I saw that girl making sand castles out of the pesticides, [there] was just a sudden gut-level reaction I couldn’t have anticipated. I was shaking when I left the store.”

Tukey issued a decree to his employees: His business was going organic. It was time to start weaning his company—and customers—off synthetic chemicals. Most clients were fine with his decision, just as long as it didn’t cost any more and as long as their lawns continued to look the same.

More than 170 municipalities in Canada have banned lawn pesticides, especially on public spaces like school yards and sports fields. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have banned 2,4-D. In 2009, the European Parliament passed laws banning 22 pesticides that can cause cancer or disrupt human hormones or reproduction.

How to Bring Back Butterflies

Certainly, switching to a less toxic lawn company can reduce your family’s—and neighbors’—exposure to synthetic chemicals. It would also reduce the pollutants you contribute to the watershed. But there is another option, one that gets into the more inspiring realm of restoration. There is a way to think of your yard as more than a burden that needs to be mowed and weeded. There is a way to think of your yard as transformational, even magical. Doug Tallamy can show you how.

When Tallamy, former chair of the entomology department at the University of Delaware, walks around his yard, he sees things most of us would not. He can look at a black cherry tree and spot the larvae of 13 tiger swallowtail butterflies. He has planted scores of trees: sweet gums, tulips, white oaks, river birches, and sugar maples. But he’s really interested in bugs and birds—and boosting their numbers.

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Suburban development has been devastating to avian populations. Most of the birds we see in our yards are probably house sparrows and starlings, invasive species from Europe. If you study the population numbers for native birds, you’ll find the wood thrush is down 48 percent; the bobwhite, 80 percent; bobolinks, 90 percent. An estimated 72 million birds are killed each year in America by direct exposure to pesticides, a number that does not include baby birds that perish because a parent died from pesticides or birds poisoned by eating contaminated insects or worms. The actual number of birds killed might be closer to 150 million.

In mid-Atlantic gardening circles, Tallamy is a bit of a prophet, his message freighted with both gloom and promise. It is the promise of ecological renewal that he most wants people to understand. His vision is based on three ideas: If you want more birds, you need more native insects; if you want more native insects, you need more native plants; and if you want more native plants, you need to get rid of—or shrink—your lawn.

Tallamy says that when we wake up in the morning to birdsong, it’s often being made by hungry migratory birds that may have just flown 300 miles. What is there to eat? Too frequently, ornamental trees that bear none of the insects the birds need—and chemically treated grass. Tallamy’s prescription: Put in native plants that will make your yard a haven for caterpillars, butterflies, and birds. In the mid-Atlantic region, this can mean swamp milkweed, butterfly weed, buttonbush, joe-pye weed, and a rudbeckia species like black-eyed Susans. At the University of Delaware, Tallamy and a team are restoring native species to the campus.

And me? I ripped up 20 percent of my lawn and planted two flower gardens, two sets of flowering shrubs, and seven vegetable beds. Now my daughter helps me pick eggplants, tomatillos, okra, and Swiss chard. My son can identify not only monarchs and tiger swallowtails but also which plants they like to eat. How? Because last year the butterflies were not here, and this year they are. We replaced the grass, which monarch caterpillars can’t eat, with native flora they can consume. It’s as simple as that. Milkweed and joe-pye weed were born to grow here. All you have to do is plant them and wait for the butterflies.

Wise Moves for a Lush Lawn

1. Get tested. “Spending money on fertilizer without a soil test is just guessing,” says Paul Tukey. Good soil is key to a great lawn, and a soil test can tell you what’s in the dirt and what’s missing. For a test, call your county extension office (a national network of agriculture experts).

2. Plant clover with your grass. Clover competes with weeds and fixes nitrogen in the soil. John Bochert, a lawn and garden specialist in York, Maine, recommends a seed mix of white clover, perennial rye (it germinates quickly), fescue, and bluegrass.

3. Mow high, and leave the clippings. Taller grass provides more leaf for photosynthesis, develops deeper roots, and resists weeds. The clippings act as fertilizer. “Lawns mowed at four inches are the most weed-free,” Tukey says. “If you did only one thing, adjusting your mower height would be it.”

4. Cut back on watering. Frequent watering leads to shallow roots, so “water once a week if at all,” says Tukey

5. Apply compost. “Weeds need light to grow,” Tukey says. “Spreading compost on a lawn in the spring prevents weed seeds from germinating.”

6. Listen to weeds … “Weeds are nothing if not messengers,” says Tukey. “Dandelions are telling you the ground needs more calcium. Plantains are telling you the ground is too compact and needs aerating.”

7. … and to insects. Beneficial nematodes, which are microscopic worms, eat some 200 species of insects, including grubs that become Japanese beetles; you can buy them from farm and garden stores. Mix them in water, and spray them on your lawn.

Edgar Allen Beem, from Down East

FROM CONTAMINATION BY MCKAY JENKINS, PUBLISHED BY AVERY, AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN PUBLISHING GROUP, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC. COPYRIGHT © 2011 BY MCKAY JENKINS.

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(Key): Hello, and welcome to Teaching Center. I’m Boyd Maxwell, with the top stories from the exciting world of teaching.

(Peele): And I’m Perry Schmidt.

Schmidt: Well, now we know. The long-awaited announcement by star English teacher Ruby Ruhf has sent teaching fans across the country into a frenzy.

Ruhf: I’ve enjoyed my time in Ohio very much, but I’m pleased to announce that I’m taking my talents back to New York City. Thank you very much.

Schmidt: Apparently PS 431 has made Ruby an offer she couldn’t refuse: $80 million guaranteed over six years, with another $40 million in incentives based on test scores. This salary puts her right up there with Rockridge Elementary’s Kati Hope and William Wu out of …

Maxwell: Colgate Magnet! Now let’s take a look at yesterday’s Teacher Draft from Radio City Music Hall, where Central Rapids High, recipient of the worst test scores last semester, made the first pick, which was no surprise to anyone.

Announcer: With the first pick, Central Rapids High takes calculus teacher Mike Yoast from Tulsa Teachers’ College!

Schmidt: And just like that, you’re a millionaire. Mike Yoast is an unbelievable story, his father living from paycheck to paycheck as a humble professional football player; the kid was a natural math-lete.

Maxwell: You know he’s going to buy his mom a house. There’s no way around that. You owe your mom.

Schmidt: Now it’s time for the Highlight of the Day.

Maxwell: Star history teacher Ashley Ferguson has been running up those test scores over at Vince Corvo High. Woo!

Ferguson: Confederate forces fired first. Can anyone tell me where this battle took place?

Schmidt: Now, look at this: She looks left, then right. She looks past the students with their arms up in the air and spots Max near the back. She sees that even though his hand isn’t up, he’s engaged.

Ferguson: Max?

Max: It was Fort Sumter?

Ferguson: That’s right.

Maxwell: Oh, come on; see what she did there? She’s bringing an introvert into the discussion, y’all. That’s a teacher-of-the-year play, right there.

Schmidt: That’s right, boy. You know the confidence gained by Max by answering that question correctly will enhance his performance the rest of the year.

Maxwell: No doubt.

Coming up after the break: Mayfield Prep trades French teacher Janeane Lowe to Skyline High for a head librarian and two lunch ladies to be named later.

ADAPTED FROM KEY & PEELE. COMEDY CENTRAL’S KEY & PEELE USED WITH PERMISSION BY COMEDY CENTRAL. COPYRIGHT© 2015 VIACOM MEDIA NETWORKS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. COMEDY CENTRAL, ALL RELATED TITLES, CHARACTERS, AND LOGOS ARE TRADEMARKS OWNED BY VIACOM MEDIA NETWORKS, A DIVISION OF VIACOM INTERNATIONAL, INC.

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I recently came across this article about Howie Mandel (a celebrity with a good-sized case of obsessive-compulsive disorder) undergoing hypnosis. Apparently while Mr. Mandel was under hypnosis, many people were able to shake his hand — something he would otherwise never allow.

I admit I know very little about hypnosis, which is defined as “a state of human consciousness involving focused attention and reduced peripheral awareness characterized by an enhanced capacity for response to suggestion.” As a teenager, I attended a couple of events where people were hypnotized, and the participants obviously said and did things they wouldn’t normally do. I actually found that frightening.

I find it interesting that exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy (the first-line psychological approach to treat OCD as recommended by the American Psychological Association) and hypnosis appear to be opposite in some ways, at least in reference to the “reduced peripheral awareness.” While hypnosis reduces your awareness of what’s going on around you because your focus is narrowed, ERP therapy requires you to be aware of what’s happening all around you, so that you can feel the anxiety that is being created by a specific situation during therapy.

In the article, Mr. Mandel describes being hypnotized “like a real and natural Xanax.” No anxiety there.

If you search the Internet for “OCD and hypnosis,” you will find all sorts of claims ranging from hypnosis as a helpful tool for those with OCD to assertions that OCD can be cured through hypnosis.

Can hypnosis help those with OCD? I don’t know for sure. But in over five years of blogging about OCD, I have never heard from anyone who has had firsthand success treating his or her OCD with hypnosis. As far as I know, there have been no studies confirming its efficacy. What bothers me most about the promotion of hypnosis as a treatment for OCD is that it steers those with OCD and their loved ones in the wrong direction; away from the evidence-based treatment that does work.

Another issue to consider is how those with OCD might feel after courageously attempting this “therapy” only to have it not help them. It’s easy to see how they might believe their OCD is not treatable and lose all hope for recovery.

There are lots of claims out there about ways to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder. Hypnosis, traditional talk therapy, and various herbs are just a few examples of therapies that are touted. But they are not evidence-based.

The bad news is there really is no easy fix for those who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder. But there’s some really good news too, and that is the fact that OCD is treatable — recovery is absolutely possible. For most people, it takes more than taking some supplements or being hypnotized. It takes a big dose of courage, determination, and hard work. It takes exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy.

One of the most difficult aspects of having OCD is finding the proper treatment. If you are ready to fight your OCD, please go down the right path and find a competent therapist who knows how to treat OCD with ERP therapy.

Hypnosis image available from shutterstock.

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Because carbohydrates raise blood sugar, managing your carbs is key to managing your diabetes. One way to do it is through carbohydrate counting. Knowing how many carbs you can have throughout the day—and following those guidelines consistently every day—will set your blood sugar levels on an even keel, make you feel more energized, and help you avoid complications of diabetes.

Most of the foods you eat—from milk and fruit to breads and grains—contain carbohydrates. There’s no way to avoid them, and you wouldn’t want to. Carbs serve as the main fuel source for your body. The trick is to avoid eating too many carbs in one day or at one sitting. Here are some of the best carbs for diabetics.

When you eat carbs, your body breaks the food down into glucose, which enters the bloodstream. That triggers your pancreas to release the hormone insulin, which helps move the glucose into your cells for energy. The more carbohydrates you eat, the more insulin your body needs to help convert the food to energy.

When you have diabetes, your pancreas doesn’t produce enough insulin or your body can’t use the insulin to move the glucose into the cells. Starved cells make you feel tired and sluggish. And chronically high blood sugar levels boost the production of free radicals and lower your immunity, on top of other negative effects.

The key, then, is to gain better control over your blood sugar levels by learning just how many carbohydrates you should eat throughout the day. Here’s what to do.

1. Determine your activity level factor
This is based on your gender and your level of physical activity. The more active you are, the more calories—and carbs—you can eat. If you’re a couch potato, rate yourself “sedentary.” If you exercise occasionally, rate yourself “lightly active.” If you exercise regularly, you’re “active.” If you exercise strenuously almost every day, you’re “very active.”

2. Calculate your daily calorie needs
Multiply your weight by your activity level factor to determine the number of calories you should eat a day to maintain your current weight. (To lose a pound a week, you’ll need to cut about 500 calories a day.) For example: A 140-pound woman with a light activity level needs 1,960 calories a day to maintain her current weight. If you’re trying to lose weight, keep in mind that women shouldn’t eat fewer than 1,200 calories a day, and men shouldn’t eat fewer than 1,500 calories a day.

3. Determine how many carbs you need
The chart below assumes you need 50 percent of your calories from carbs. (Work with a registered dietitian to determine the best carb targets for you. According to the American Diabetes Association and the American Dietetic Association, carbohydrates can vary from 40 to 55 percent of total calories.) Carb choices are foods that contain about 15 grams of carbs per serving. For example, 8 ounces of milk has 12 grams of carbs per serving and would count as one carb choice. You’ll find the number of carbs listed on nutrition labels on your foods.

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4. Look at the fiber content of your food
If the food you plan to eat contains more than 5 grams of fiber, subtract the number of fiber grams from the total grams of carbs. For example, if a can of chili contains 24 grams of carbs and 9 grams of fiber per cup, count the serving as 15 grams of carbs, or one carb choice. Check out these health benefits of a high-fiber diet for diabetes.

5. Spread your carb choices throughout your meals
If you want to eat five carb choices for breakfast, you could have 4 ounces of orange juice (one carb choice), two slices of whole wheat toast (two carb choices) 3/4 cup of Cheerios with 8 ounces of milk (two carb choices), and a cup of black coffee (which has no carbs).

6. Check your blood sugar
Check your blood sugar before your meal and two hours after your meal and write down the results, along with what you ate. Marking a record of what you eat and the way your blood sugar responds will help you make the best food decisions. Everyone’s body will respond differently to the amount of carbs eaten, so it’s essential that you find out how many carbs work for you throughout the day. Checking your blood sugar isn’t necessarily something you have to do every day forever, but do it for several days to get a feel for how your body responds to your meals. Your target blood sugar levels should fall within these ranges

1. Fasting or before your meals:90 to 130 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl)
2. Two hours after the start of your meal:less than 180 mg/dl
3. At bedtime: 100 to 140 mg/dl

7. Make adjustments
If your blood sugar levels are too high two hours after a meal, try getting some exercise or adjusting your meal. Take a walk after eating to see if the levels go down, or try taking out a carb choice. If that doesn’t work, consult your health-care provider. Perhaps a medication adjustment will help.